Quote:
Originally Posted by AdmiralAkbar
-You are very well versed on telling us where the law currently is, and most of this is not disputed.. I would say this is an argument of where the law SHOULD be. Think the MPAA would rather you just buy another MP3 copy of a CD you already own to put it on your iPod? You bet they do! But should it really be that way? I say no.
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I think of it like this: copyright law, as it was originally intended, was to give someone a temporary monopoly on an original idea or design. When it was originally created, there was no way that the original drafters could have foreseen that multi-multi-billion dollar mega corporations would be able to have copyrights on hundreds of thousands of works, and would then re-write their words to extend copyright from a length of twenty years, to a point of basically indefinite length (see: Disney Corporation).
Copyright law was created in a time where "technology" meant taking movable pieces of type, setting them in place, covering them with ink, and smooshing them onto a piece of paper. It was created so that original ideas could not just be instantly copied and sold, removing the original author's ability to fairly capitalize on their original idea for a reasonable period of time.
Copyright law was NOT meant to force consumers to buy, re-buy, re-re-buy, and re-re-re-buy content over and over, simply because technology allows for higher-quality viewing. This is nothing but the media industry abusing their vast amounts of money and resources to contort and re-interpret the original spirit of the law to take advantage of a way to milk the consumers for more money every 5-10 years. Unfortunately, this is what has happened. This was going great for them, until many consumers started getting sick of having to deal with using the content that they fairly paid for, only how the media industry so benevolently bestowed upon them. The media industry simply wasn't keeping up with the times, recognizing things like portable players, digital copies being streamed to multiple locations in the home, ringtones on phones, etc. All of these things, because they didn't have a legitimate response for them, are now being taken out of their control, and they HATE it. So what are they to do? Well, now they're trying to simply change the rules, and turn people who fairly paid for their content, and simply want to use it in a different manner, out to be criminals.
This is NOT what copyright law was intended to do. It was not meant to be used to turn normal people into criminals. It was not designed to even account for the rapid adoption and evolution of technology. And it CERTAINLY was not designed as a way for mega corporations to alter and manipulate how our government works.